WAKEshine

I’m starting a new series on how I solve the Rubik’s Cube.  I have two methods.  One I call the "Sunday Afternoon" method because you only have to remember about four patterns–each of which is easy–and you can use these to leisurely work your way through the cube.  I think it is a fun method.

Then I build on that to make a faster method, using the same techniques and stages but adding some more patterns and techniques.

Before I describe either, let me talk about the cube itself for a while….

The cube has six faces.  Each face has nine tiles on it.  One way to look at the cube is as a collection of 54 tiles.

But if you examine the cube closely, you’ll notice there are actually three types of pieces:

• Centers: one color only
• Edges: two colors
• Corners: three colors

Seeing the cube in this way makes it easier to solve.  There are rules that all of these pieces obey.  For example, look at the colors of the centers on your cube.  No matter how you twist and move the faces, you cannot change which colors are opposites.  In fact, the center arrangement never changes at all: neighbors remain neighbors.

On my favorite cube, for example, if I rotate the cube in my hands to put white on top and orange in front, blue will be on the right, gren on the left, red in the back, and yellow on the bottom.  Every time.

Another rule is that edge pieces flip in pairs.  If you have an edge in the right position but with the wrong colors showing, there is guaranteed to be another edge somewhere that also needs to be flipped.

Corners are slightly more complicated.  Corners have "twists"–they can be rotated clockwise (positive) and counterclockwise (negative).  In the same way that you can’t have just one edge flipped, you cannot have just one corner twisted.

If you have only two corners out of place on a cube, then one must be positive and one negative.  If only three corners are not facing the right way, then it must be three positives or three negatives, because every multiple of three cancels out.

Sound complicated?  There is a whole branch of math around the cube and you can get as deeply as you like into the mechanics of moves.

But for Sunday afternoon solving, you don’t need to learn any of that.  You just need to learn a few basic skills and four easy-to-learn patterns.

Let’s get started!  First, read up on How Moves are Notated.